Ellsworth Kelly
American, 1923-2015 (active France)

Shadow on Stairs, Villa La Combe, Meschers, 1950
gelatin silver print
14 x 11 in.

Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, Spencertown, New York



Ellsworth Kelly in the area of his studio where he paints. Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times



Ellsworth Kelly - La Combe III, 1951

COMMENTS

While staying with friends at the Villa La Combe in Meschers, France, in the summer of 1950, Ellsworth Kelly closely observed a flight of stairs and the complex shadows cast upon it by the balustrade. He photographed the stairs and made numerous sketches, recording the shadows throughout the day as the position of the sun changed. These photographs and sketches became the basis of a series of works titled La Combe.

https://whitney.org/collection/works/17193


In the summer of 1950 Ellsworth Kelly borrowed a camera from the mother of his host, Delphine Seyrig, while staying at her house in Meschers, France. One of the photographs he took with that camera records a map of shadows refracted on a set of stairs. The image is impressionistic - a momentary effect of light, captured - but also tightly structured; the staircase is centered in the frame exactly, from above, and the field of the photograph is divided between blurred, cracked earth and the fragmented interplay of shadows mapped on the uneven surface ·of the stairway.

The shadows that traversed the stairs fascinated Kelly; he drew and redrew them intently, the unpredictable index of shadows seeming, somehow, already composed, already on fire with meaning. He painted variations on this theme for months upon his return to Paris, and the resulting series was called La Combe after Seyrig's house in Meschers. The status of the photographs of the scene, however, is less clear than that of the paintings that transcribed it: are they merely documents, aides-memoires?

The La Combe paintings were developed from pencil sketches made on site in Meschers - they still exist - and the photograph was taken afterward, to record the scene of perception. To Kelly's mind, the photo failed even in this mimetic function. It is suggestive, though, that the lines of La Combe Ill are basically the same as those described by the composition of the Meschers photo that has been most reproduced; Kelly must have drawn the image and taken the photograph at the same time of day, and from the same angle.

The similarity suggests that the camera in this instance did something other than merely record the scene; at least in retrospect, its presence was somehow talismanic, essential to recognizing the painting as indexically "capturing," versus impressionistically rendering, his vision of the world. The Meschers photo makes concrete this provocative, if submerged, dialectic in Kelly's work between abstraction and "record"; the most successful objects from this period all use this rhetoric of precise indexical transcription of the world.

- Madeleine Grynsztejn and Julian Meyers, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2002